WHEN I first saw Las Molieres’ grenier (attic) I was deeply impressed. The floor was timber lined, there was adequate lighting and, if small enough, one could stand upright in most of it.

It was clean, obviously watertight and a perfect space for all those things we haven’t the heart to get rid of, or park for attention at another time.

Fatal for a woman like me.

In went three bin bags of soft toys I just couldn’t give away; walking poles and skis long outgrown by my son; an old glass TV table, once the chicest thing around; half of a 14ft outrageously expensive handmade fake Christmas tree; three boxfuls of Christmas decorations; board games; two boxes of computer games and meaningless cables; several tennis and squash racquets; cricket pads and bat; hurley, hockey and baseball sticks; video and camera equipment, including a tripod, and boxes of LPs and singles that I know will one day make me my fortune.

At the heart of all the carefully arranged must-keeps, were/are two full size packing cases.

They contain pack after pack of photographs with their negatives also included in the wallets.

I saw myself whiling away the après fun-filled hours in France happily pasting them into the pile of leather bound photograph albums ready to be updated downstairs.

The ones already filled began after Pierce’s birth and were carefully kept up with black inked notations for seven years. And then I stopped, always meaning to catch up and of course years went by and our snapshot lives were reduced to the two tea-cases that found a home in France.

My houses have always been filled with photographs but most of them I realise are from those productive few years and are taking on an already dated, other era look.

Some of my younger photos are actually fading – fading like me– and others are being eaten away from over assiduous wet cleaning of frames from uncaring hands.

Indeed, looking at some is like seeing the past dissolving, as of course, it has.

Sometimes failing memories are simply not enough; one needs to be jerked into a lost day, a lost time by those glossy pictures trapped behind plastic covers on boards going brown at the edges.

I doubt I’ll ever sit down and fill those expensive tooled leather albums that themselves are now relics from another time.

For now, there is Twitter and my newest procrastination tool, Instagram, allied to an iPhone.

Since digital there has been no need to hand film into high street shops, returning to sit in the car and rip up the horrors of oneself before taking them home for open viewing.

Now one can click, delete, amend, brighten, and filter. One can even use apps to overlay the photographs with the imagery of great painters.

And one can Photoshop away lines and lumps and bumps that don’t fit the image that dances still in one’s head.

Looking at the pictures I have uploaded to Instagram, mainly of Cesar, the house, my region, I can see a rather lovely, intense explosion of colour and yes, beauty.

I see what to many is a vibrant, enviable, lucky life and frequently it serves to slap me when I mump and moan.

For it is.

Yet I know that all have been carefully chosen; all, barring amusing bedraggled dog shots, are rather enticing and delightful.

It is only in these columns that you see the tumultuous thoughts, fears and complicated equations that go with my/our real lives.

Thank God for words to tell the truth, for the picture always lies, no matter what they say.

It’s strange and perhaps because, God willing, in a month I shall have my first grandchild, that I’m thinking far, far ahead as to what will be of me in this world when no-one is left to remember me directly.

A part of me is pleased that, if not destroyed, there is a digital record of a life and time apparently lived in some beauty.

There will be a series of photographs that will still glow with the past and not dissolve as those behind their silver frames are doing before my eyes.

There will be few portraits, no ‘selfies’ of me beyond the age of 50, because, again, in this perfected imagery, I have no desire to be seen as I decay.

That would not have occurred of course before digital, because no control could be exercised over what the snap revealed.

So I use the hash tag throwback Thursday, as it’s known on both accounts, to show myself in my prime, before the natural process of ageing had fully begun.

Vain? Hell, yes.

Perhaps, surprisingly, I pay far too much attention to the image but that is because I know it is only in the movement of the face that one sees the soul.

So I believe that, if they’re saved, the photos in their wallets in the attic are far better than all those carefully placed in their digital splendour.

Here will be found the unhappy look caught in the eye, the glance to the side of detachment, but also the truth that we never reveal when we can obliterate it.

Ah, so Oscar was right: look to the portrait in the attic.